


Chasing An Illusion

by kelark59



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Fan Work Exchange, M/M, kinda sad but kinda cute, maybe good idk read it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 20:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1578818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelark59/pseuds/kelark59
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post TWS (so, of course, also post TDW)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jjjat3am](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/gifts).



> There is a playlist for this, here → http://8tracks.com/kelark59/thundershield-exchange  
> This is a gift for jjjat3am on Tumblr

Maintaining a relationship was hard work.  Everyone who’d ever tried to do so would testify that.  It was especially difficult when you were in their Situation.  (Situation had earned itself a capital letter by being so cumbersome and ridiculous.)  The Situation involved a prince who spent half his time away on his home planet (which garnered a big “what the hell” from Steve’s rational brain).  It also involved a super soldier who spent long stretches away from home searching the planet for his best friend who had been brainwashed by nazis and had a robot arm, in the company of his new roommate who had not been brainwashed by anybody and had robot wings (another thing that triggered Steve’s “what the hell” reflex).  The Situation itself entailed the two of them trying to engage in a relationship while not losing track of their individual missions (the biggest “what the hell” of them all, how did he even stumble into a relationship with a Norse god, of all people?).  So yes, the Situation made maintaining a relationship even harder work than it normally was.

“I miss my boyfriend,” Steve sighed, flopping back onto the motel bed.  They were in South Carolina at the moment.  You’d think a sunny suburban community in South Carolina would be the last place the winter woldier would hide out.  You’d think wrong, doubtlessly, because Bucky had been hiding out among the whitewashed picket fences and charming brick churches of Saunders, South Carolina.  Or, he had the month before.  Lately it seemed like the two of them were chasing shadows and hints and glimpses in alleys more than an actual man, and it was frustrating.  Steve just wanted to go home and have Thor there so he could hear all about what Thor had thought of the Harry Potter books Steve had sent to Asgard with him three weeks prior, he just wanted to be with Sam and Thor and have Bucky come to them and be himself and not the winter soldier.  That was what Steven Grant Rogers wanted, dammit, it wasn’t like he was asking for the moon.  But he knew he was asking for far too much, and nothing good came without hard work.  Sam raised his eyebrows at the somewhat sudden change of topic, they’d been talking about a soccer game playing on the cheap TV situated in front of the two double beds in their room.

“Never would have guessed,” he murmured, looking up at the ceiling.  He glanced back over at the brooding blond man adjacent to him, and sighed.  “I miss him too, dude, although probably not as much or in the same ways, I guess.  I don’t know, I’ve never been in a relationship with a viking god.  And what is that even like, man?”  Steve didn’t appear to hear the question, though, lost in thought as he was.  Sam just grinned; who would have even guessed that Captain America would be such a goddamn drama queen?  The whole sigh, pitiful announcement, flop thing was not a strange thing for Sam to witness Steve partaking in, but it still amused him how out of character it was.  For Steve’s public image, for his personal views of himself, for the way he behaved around everyone but Sam, it was out of character, but around Sam he kind of let his guard down enough to become the ninety five year old man version of a sassy teenage girl.

Steve felt guilty; memories were swirling and twining together in his head.  Memories of teaching Thor to play chess (he’d caught on straight away) and how to figure out which street vendors to buy food from (he’d had a little more trouble grasping those concepts), along with the hollow ache that came with missing the larger man and his silly grin and having someone to fight with who he didn’t have to worry about hurting.  Those emotions mingled with the dull ache he felt remembering sneaking into an aquarium with an eleven year old Bucky, and the sharper melancholy of trying to align that little boy with the broken, brainwashed robot who’d pulled him out of a river and saved his life without even remembering who he was.  He was angry over what had been done to his best friend, he was determined to catch up to the winter soldier, he was nervous that even once he did he might never be able to get Bucky back out of that mess, he was sad that he hadn’t seen Thor in so long, and he was guilty because Bucky and Thor both deserved all of his attention and he had to split it between them.

Sam noticed the way Steve’s silence had gone from melodramatic to anguished, and the grin dropped off his face like turpentine.  He thought for a moment over what he would even be able to say to assuage him, and decided that there was probably nothing.  This happened far too often, Steve falling off the edge into the abyss, and generally what Sam would do was leave him alone for awhile to sort himself out.  After all, Sam had more than his fair share of bullshit and knew that you didn’t always want someone else to offer help.  Mind made up, he gestured to Steve and picked up his cell phone, stepping outside the motel room to call his sister.  He wrinkled his nose; the mildewy smell of the room was that much more noticeable when you stepped out of it into cleaner air.  The phone rang four times before Sarah picked up.

Steve glared up at the off-white popcorn ceiling and clawed at the floral printed vinyl comforter on his bed.  This is such an ugly hotel room.  Not that it mattered much to Steve, there was no doubt in his mind that he’d slept in far worse places, but he’d learned early on to appreciate beauty, which in turn led to a recognition of the opposite.  All other thoughts aside, though, Steve was getting restless.  He wanted to go home, he wanted to be done.  But he couldn’t just give up on Bucky like that, could he?  No, it was irrelevant whether he could or not, because he wasn’t going to either way.  With you till the end of the line, pal.  He wasn’t going to turn his back when his best friend needed him most.  Not like you have anything waiting for you at home anyway, Rogers.  He scowled; oh no, he was not going to start getting bitter at Thor for being away on Asgard.  Asgard was Thor’s home even more than Brooklyn was Steve’s, and they’d agreed a long time ago not to get upset at over conflicting lives.  They’d known the circumstances when they started doing this.

“Hang on, Sarah, I’m gonna have to call you back,” Sam sighed when his phone started ringing in the middle of the call, clicking off his sister and opening the call from a private number.  “Hello,” he answered, completely perplexed as to who would be calling him.  Steve and Sarah were kind of the only two people he still spoke to on a regular basis after uprooting his life to go on a manhunt with Captain America.  He looked up at the sky, cloudy and gray despite the unbearable mugginess of the air around him.

“Sam, hey, it’s me.  I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I thought I’d pass it on, the winter soldier is in West Virginia.  I’m not anymore, so don’t bother with that, but he might still be for a little while.  Try Milledgeville, West Virginia.  I didn’t see him myself or else I would have done something.”  Sam opened and closed his mouth several times, absorbing the cryptic information from Natasha.

“I’ll tell Steve.  Thanks, Nat,” he said, and hung up.  He texted Sarah saying he’d call her tomorrow and something had come up, and burst back into the motel room.

Steve looked up at the frankly vicious way Sam tore in the door, and thought about asking if something had gone wrong with his sister, but he didn’t get a single word out before he was being yanked off the bed.  He put his shoes on while he listened to Sam ramble about the call from Natasha, and grabbed his duffel off the foot of his bed.  We didn’t even get to sleep here, Steve sighed internally, but he decided that if they caught up to Bucky in Milledgeville, there was a good chance he’d be doing so in his own bed by the end of the week, which was worth it.  He couldn’t wait to just be done with this.

All the things that could go wrong raced through Steve’s head.  He might get away from us once we have him.  He might be too far gone for me to ever get Bucky out of him.  He might be angry with me when I do.  Steve frowned and physically shook his head, as if to dislodge the thoughts.  He’d known all that going into this, and he’d decided a long time ago that everyone was worth saving, no matter the consequences.  It wasn’t Bucky’s responsibility to save himself, and it wasn’t the winter soldier’s responsibility to know that he was Bucky and that Steve was, in fact, saving him.  He pulled his feet up onto the car seat and rested his chin on his knees, a position that wasn’t entirely comfortable for a man his size but a familiar one nonetheless, and wondered if this was going to be the end of their hunt.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Steve sat in the back of the car with the winter soldier (who, now that he was there, could never be called Bucky in his current state, this man was not Bucky) halfway in his lap and halfway dead, while Sam sped the rental car up the highway at three AM.  Steve sighed and ran his hand through the winter soldier’s hair (too long and very dirty) and decided to start talking and fill the silence.

“I think you and my boyfriend will like each other, he’s very nice,” Steve commented, and the winter soldier shifted restlessly and tried to pull away from Steve’s hands, but Steve didn’t allow that to happen, just kept talking.  “His name is Thor, he’s the Norse god of thunder.  You’ve heard of him, I’m sure, but you might not remember very well.  He’s really good at video games and he’s a very smart man who’s just fantastic at having conversations, but he spends a lot of time on his home planet... you would have gotten along with him swimmingly, before.”  That got the brunet’s attention, and suddenly Steve was met with the laser focus of a pair of intense gunmetal blue eyes.

The eyes were somewhat unsettling, to tell the truth.  They were so familiar and yet so strange.  Before they’d held so much cockiness and pride and strength and ferocity and love, and it had been strangling to be on the end of one of his looks.  Now, however, the eyes were bloodshot and glassy and lined by deep purple bruises, and they darted around wildly like an animal caught in a cage.  It made Steve want to kill people who were already dead, to see that confidence in his best friend’s eyes broken down to instinct and animalistic fear.  The winter soldier cleared his throat and looked down at his lap and back up again.

“Steve?” he asked, and Steve raised his eyebrows.  That was the first time in seventy years that his best friend had spoken his name, and it was all wrong.  There was none of the conviction or fierce protectiveness that the one syllable had held before.  Now it was timid.  Bucky would have been appalled to hear his voice used so incorrectly.  Steve smiled sadly to himself; very few people knew how to make his name sound like something special, rather than something that one out of every one hundred people on planet earth carried (a statistic Steve had learned from Doctor Banner).  Sarah Rogers, who gave it to her son along with what little else she could, Bucky Barnes, who truly believed that a scrappy little blond kid had the makings of a hero, and Thor Odinson, who somehow made Steve believe that too, if only by the way his name sounded coming from the god’s mouth.  Reverent, almost.  He bit his lip and looked at the winter soldier, whose dove-gray eyes were once again hyper-focused on Steve.  The winter soldier swallowed and pursed his lips.  “Where are we going?”  Steve closed his eyes.

“We’re going to Washington DC.  That’s where Sam and I live, we have a house there.  Thor lives with us when he’s on earth, and I guess you’re going to now, too, buddy.”  He swallowed, his throat feeling very dry suddenly, and reached up to trace the dark red bruise forming on his jaw and neck where the winter soldier had knocked Steve’s head back during what Steve was trying not to think of as a fist fight, once they’d caught up to him.  He tried not to think of it at all.  The way the winter soldier had shivered, his breath rattling, the way he clung to the stray dog that looked almost as world-weary and filthy as the man did.  Steve turned his head to his other side and looked at the chocolate lab curled on the warm leather seat and smiled in melancholy; he was taking in two stray animals in one night and he was going to try and build one of them back up into his best friend.  The winter soldier was eerily quiet, except for the way his metal arm, which now had a few bits missing and barely moved on its own, whirred and creaked as it came up to touch the livid bruising on Steve’s face.  Steve tensed and ground his teeth together.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.  Why did I do that?”  Sam stopped the car on the empty stretch of freeway and turned around to look at them.  Steve patted the back of the metal hand and whispered his forgiveness, gesturing for Sam to keep driving, which he obliged cautiously.  “What are video games?” Bucky asked, and now that he was talking Steve felt a little less blasphemous for referring to him as Bucky, although it was still off-kilter like green skies over a blue field.  Steve sighed and smiled a little at the safe, familiar conversation.

“Oh, it’s really cool, it- I don’t know how much you remember about anything, because I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I’m assuming you know what a television is.  You can hook systems up to your television and play games on it.”  Bucky looked vaguely intrigued and somewhat impressed, and Steve smiled, the first genuine smile in at least fifteen hours.  “Sam can teach you to play some of the games on the PS4, video games aren’t my thing really, but they might be yours.”  Bucky scowled, looking intimidated and gut-wrenchingly frustrated with the idea of being allowed to have a thing, and just like that he was back to being the winter soldier, staring desolately out the car window at the chain-link fence on the side of the freeway.  Steve huffed but didn’t say anything, he hadn’t expected this to be easy and had no right to lose his patience, now or ever.  He turned back to the dog and decided maybe a change of topic wouldn’t go amiss.  “Does your dog have a name?” he asked.

He had no doubt that the dirty, sickly little thing was Bucky’s.  Small for a labrador, and far too thin, they’d been curled together in the back of an abandoned car that definitely screamed of a trusting relationship.  The way the winter soldier had put the dog in the car before he himself would even consider getting in was another clue.  And it was so very like Bucky to run around picking up sick little things and laying down his life for them, it was practically all he’d ever done.  Bucky raised his head at the mention of his dog, who he checked to make sure was still sleeping soundly before narrowing his eyes at Steve.

“Her name is Animal,” he mumbled after a moment, and Steve smiled widely.  Before he got a chance to ask why, Bucky answered.  “As in ‘you can’t follow me, you stupid animal’, and then she does anyway.”  Steve and Sam both laughed at that, and Bucky swallowed nervously at the sound before smiling very hesitantly himself.  Animal opened her eyes and made a sound before closing them again.  Steve wanted to cry; it was like his best friend was back, almost.  It wasn’t quite perfect, but really, everything was working out like clockwork, and the force of pressure lifting off his shoulders was deafening.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

The norse god of thunder sat idly watching his chicken burrito spin around and around in the microwave, which he had long ago figured out how to use, thank you kindly.  He’d said goodbye to his brother (who only Thor was aware was not actually their father) earlier that day and returned to earth and to Washington DC, only to find that Steve and Sam were gone, for at least a week.  Thor had been gone for three, a lot longer than he usually liked to be away, but he had hoped that the two wouldn’t be out on one of their sporadically-placed manhunts when he returned.  He missed Steve quite a bit, really, and whenever they went away chasing the winter soldier Thor had no idea when they’d be back or in what physical and emotional state.  He perked at the sound of a car coming up the driveway and grinned.

Steve followed Bucky and Animal out of the car and smiled widely.  Thor was home, finally!  He felt a pang of guilt and wondered how long he’d been sitting in the house alone, but shook his head and raced up the porch steps.  Thor opened the door before Steve could and the latter threw his arms around his boyfriend.  He’d missed him so much, Thor was never away that long.  Bucky was standing warily in the door with Animal hunched protectively in front of him, casting little dog glares at Thor, who seemed stunned into silence by the presence of the man Steve had devoted the last year of his life to finding.  Bucky clenched his jaw and stepped forward minutely, holding out his hand (not the robotic one) to the god.

“My name is... Bucky?  I am here to learn how to play video games.”  Thor thought for a moment and then grinned and was about to say something when his burrito beeped in the microwave and he suddenly raced off and back into the room with a hot plate containing a previously frozen chicken burrito.  He sat down on the couch with a smile on his face, biting into the burrito without any concern for the fact that there was still steam rising off the bread.

“It is wonderful to finally meet you, Bucky, my name is Thor.  I would be delighted to teach you how to play video games.  Would you like some of my burrito?”  Steve bit the inside of his cheek and watched as a myriad of emotions danced across Bucky’s shadowed face, shock and then anger and then confusion and then calm, and he nodded silently and sat down, holding out his hand.  Thor looked at the metal arm and sighed as he handed Bucky a chunk of warm cheesy burrito.  “Mister Stark could look at your arm, Bucky, and fix it for you, if you would like.”  Bucky gasped near-inaudibly and wrapped his hand so tightly around the metal wrist that his knuckles turned white.

“I don’t want them to hurt me.”  Rage blinded Steve at that meekly delivered statement, and he very nearly staggered with the force of it.  Sam cleared his throat and muttered something about a nap before disappearing up the stairs, and Thor cast Steve a serious glance and gestured for him to sit down, in between the two men already on the couch.  Steve did so, and smiled in what he hoped was a collected manner at Bucky, who looked vaguely sick and still very shocked.

“No one is going to hurt you, Bucky, I swear,” Steve assured him, and Bucky cleared his throat and stood up, seeming at a loss for where to go.  “You should take Animal for a walk so she can scope out her territory a little,” he suggested, and Bucky seemed relieved at that, getting up and walking out the front door and trusting (correctly) the labrador to trot along happily behind him.  That rasp in Bucky’s breath was still worrying Steve, and the way Animal limped, and they were both too thin and too dirty, but they were safe and they were there and it was okay.  Steve leaned forward and pushed his forehead against Thor’s chest, closing his eyes.  Hysterical laughter bubbled out of his chest, and Thor wrapped his arms around Steve.

“What’s the matter?” Thor asked quietly, and Steve was still laughing but it was manic and all wrong and the way he crumpled against Thor spoke volumes on how much the last twenty four hours had cost him.  Thor just sighed and held him and tilted his head back against the couch.  What was he supposed to do when his boyfriend got exactly what he’d been chasing for a year but it wasn’t what he wanted?  Really, the raw dangerous emotion reminded Thor uncomfortably of Loki; as did the hollow sound the usually bright laughter carried.  So, he decided, he would do exactly as he wished he could have done for Loki, when he was at his lowest and needed his brother most and had isolated himself too far to get that help; he just sat and held him and told him it would be alright.

“It’s not fair, Thor, it isn’t fair, they did this to him, he’s my best friend and I can’t even have him back now that I’ve found him, it’s not fair.”  Steve wanted to hit himself for daring to say that.  Nothing was ever fair.  It wasn’t fair that his father died when he was a kid.  It wasn’t fair that he was smaller than everyone else and got picked on so badly.  It wasn’t fair that his mother had to work three jobs just to support the two of them on shaky legs.  It wasn’t fair that he was the only one who ever got the serum, not fair to everyone else who could have.  It wasn’t fair that he missed seventy years of life when he was still perfectly alive, thank you.  It wasn’t fair that Howard was dead and Peggy didn’t remember him and now neither did Bucky.  Nothing was fair.  Thor hummed in agreement and rubbed his hands up and down Steve’s back.

“It is not fair, Steve, but the ones who did this to him are all dead or in prison now, aren’t they?  You’ve really come out on top here, I’m sure you know, and you know, he’s making excellent progress already, and he’s only been with you a few hours.  Imagine what you, Sam and I could do for that poor man over the course of months?”  Steve nodded and buried his face against Thor’s neck, frown still firmly latched on his face.  “It’s only going to get easier, I promise.”  That made Steve relax a little bit, and he nodded again, more solidly this time.

“Thank you, Thor,” he mumbled into the bigger (not by much) man’s neck, and Thor laughed and kissed the top of Steve’s head, wrapping his arms around him tighter.  He hoped it was true that it would only get easier, but even if it wasn’t, he had Thor.  And Sam.  And maybe someday Bucky, or something resembling Bucky.  God, that sounded good.  Steve figured it was worth sticking around just to see.

 


End file.
